This appalling article is a quintessential example of how wrongheaded and foolish police departments all over the country are in their dealings with Muslim communities. Comments interspersed below.

“Police in Las Vegas forge close ties to the city’s Muslim community,” by John M. Glionna, Washington Post, May 22, 2016:

LAS VEGAS — The two officers were on foot, chasing down a skinny street player who was peddling crack and pot from a grimy West Las Vegas alleyway.

The dealer was fleet-footed, and the last they saw, he had ducked into a nearby mosque. Breathless, the officers stopped at the gate and considered their options. It was 2008.

“We stood there, hemming and hawing,” said Lt. Sasha Larkin of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. “We didn’t know anything about the place other than it was green. We were like, ‘Can we even go in there?’ In the end, we just walked away, saying, ‘Maybe another day.’ ”

OK, so a drug dealer goes inside the mosque, and police officers don’t know if they can go in there? If he had ducked into a church, would they have been so circumspect? And as it happened, they let him go altogether, because he was inside the mosque. That’s an indication of how thoroughly cowed police forces are today regarding Muslims and Islam.

The luckless pursuit, however, was not a total bust.

Looks as if it wasn’t a bust at all, in fact.

The department soon decided it needed plainclothed foot patrols in the high-crime neighborhood to better know the people who lived there, including the adherents of the Masjid As-Sabur mosque.

Now, Larkin and a cadre of officers are regular guests at a half-dozen mosques across this gambling mecca as part of a concerted outreach effort to the Muslim community. They grasp the tensions between Shiite and Sunni factions and have learned to observe key Islamic customs — officers remove their shoes, and female officers don hijabs during Friday prayer sessions. In an effort to build trust, they have emerged as empathetic problem solvers, helping religious leaders cut through city red tape, responding to reports of vandalism and cleaning up trash and abandoned vehicles.

So a criminal ducked into a mosque, police feared to pursue him into it, and subsequently established an outreach program in which they signal to the Muslim community their submission and acceptance of Islamic norms. This is progress?

If you can stomach any more, read the rest with commentary by Jihad Watch.